New Year's resolutions about losing weight or organizing the
garage may not last more than a few weeks, but it's possible to
start the year with plans for your business that will persist for a
full 12 months--or even longer.

But like the often-repeated resolution of an out-of-shape person
that this year will be different, resolutions for a business go
nowhere if they entail recreating reality. Resolutions that push
for incremental progress or for simple clarity of thought are the
ones that stick, say successful entrepreneurs and business
advisors.

"Making resolutions means taking a risk, but the thing we
all need to do to stay in business these days is constantly put our
companies at risk," says Tom Mears, CEO of Holland Inc.,
parent company of the Pacific Northwest's Burgerville USA
chain. "The only way to grow in 1999 is to keep yourself from
becoming complacent and find things you can change about the way
you operate."

Five years ago, Mears, who is at the helm of the Vancouver,
Washington, family-run company, detected that the old-line burger
house was quickly losing ground to the big chains and resolved to
turn it around. "Without taking some risks and deciding to
make changes, we'd have kept sliding," says Mears, 57. Now
the company is on firm footing with sales of $47 million this
year.

Of course, there's nothing magical about laying plans in
January: Sharp-minded entrepreneurs are always charting the route
ahead, no matter what time of year it is. But January, when frosty
weather and the post-holiday slowdown leave many businesses quiet,
is a fine time to take stock and think deeply about your overall
strategy and approach to your business.

So forget about that messy garage or the extra inches in your
waistline--for now, at least--and instead consider making some of
these 15 resolutions that have worked for your fellow
entrepreneurs:

1. Give Your Goals a Reality Check

When Portland, Oregon, chef Paul Wenner, 51, set out in 1985 to
infiltrate the world of burgers with his meatless Gardenburger,
his goal was broad: Change the world's eating habits. By the
beginning of 1986, he had deals with 70 restaurants to carry his
creation, which has a base of mushrooms and brown rice instead of
soybeans, the more common alternative burger base.

As 1986 dawned, Wenner recalls, "I decided I really wanted
to kick all year and get to 200 restaurants--which meant more than
doubling our business. And I did it." In fact, he overshot the
mark, ending the year with 220 restaurants on his client list. For
1987, he resolved to aim for 400 restaurants--and he beat his goal
by 50 restaurants. Today, Gardenburgers are on the menus of more
than 40,000 U.S. restaurants.

"One of the keys to success is having an objective you want
to reach, but to get there, you need to set a series of [smaller]
goals along the way," says Joe Giglierano, a marketing
professor at California's San Jose State University. "Each
[smaller] goal should stretch you a little more but be reasonable,
and as you figure out ways to reach each of them, you move yourself
toward your long-term goal."

This strategy works for Wenner in a carrot-and-stick kind of
way. "I always have a number out there as my goal, and all
year I'm checking my progress to see if I'm on track to hit
the goal," Wenner says. "One year, it was 'I'll
get into 25 percent of the health-food stores [in the United
States],' and I did it. So the next year, the number was 60
percent, and I did that, too. Every year, I've been within 5
percent of what I said I'd do."

It's a simple, timeless technique--but one many
entrepreneurs don't find time for. Make the time, and soon you
may wind up in the same class as Gardenburger, which is now a $500
million company.

2. Make Your Move

That may be in a literal, geographic sense or in a more abstract
way. Is your product right for this particular market or for some
other one?

Judi Shepard Missett, 54, was a professional dancer and dance
instructor in the Chicago suburbs when she worked up the idea that
would become Jazzercise, a dance-based fitness program that is now
taught in 19,000 classes every week nationwide. In 1972, three
years into the idea's development, she and her husband felt
drawn to Southern California. In December of that year, they quit
their jobs and headed for San Diego.

Leaving Chicago meant turning her back on the city's theater
business, which had kept her busy performing, but Missett quickly
realized that in doing so, she'd opened herself up to a major
new opportunity. "San Diego was and still is very open to
anything that has to do with health and fitness," she says.
"So people were very ready for these classes I wanted to
teach. They wanted me everywhere in town; it was nothing like
Chicago. [Jazzercise] spread like wildfire."

3. Tune in to Your Employees

Is yours the kind of workplace where when one person is swamped,
another naturally helps carry the load? Or do your employees keep
their heads down and do only the tasks that are theirs? Do your
employees expect that for the company to win, they have to lose, or
do they think a win-win scenario is possible?

Houda Samaha is a Framingham, Massachusetts, management
consultant who specializes in prepping corporate staffs for
innovation and change. In her work, she's noticed that too many
entrepreneurs and managers assume everybody below them knows
what's expected of them, but they never bother to find out if
that's really true. By discovering what your workers believe is
standard practice, you may find openings for profitable changes,
she says.

Samaha notes that early on, FedEx's well-known hub system
was full of bugs. Although the company promised overnight delivery,
entire shipments were sometimes stalled at the company's
Memphis, Tennessee, hub, causing bottlenecks throughout the system.
The reason, says Samaha, was that the crucial work of unloading,
sorting and reloading packages was being done by wage workers who
were paid to put in eight hours, no matter how quickly or slowly
the work got done.

"They put in eight hours, and if the planes hadn't all
been unloaded, so what? They went home," she says. When
executives who wanted to make good on the company's service
vows figured out this was the norm, they adopted a new pay policy
that changed everything. Now workers are paid for a set number of
hours per week even if the work is finished in half the time.

"You can't change people's behavior unless you know
what's making them act the way they do," Samaha says. Once
you've determined the reason employees perform the way they do,
give them a better reason to do something different.

4. Get Caught in the Web

Should you set up a website or not? Marketing professor
Giglierano says there's no point in waffling anymore: You must
have a presence on the web.

For consumer-oriented firms, it may not yet be an urgent
situation, he says, "but for business-to-business operations,
it's almost mandatory." So many potential clients are
using the World Wide Web to search for vendors now that not having
a site of your own is akin to opening a restaurant and not putting
a sign out front. "It's the way people do business
now," Giglierano says. "If you want to do business, you
have to be there."

5. Give It Up

At the end of 1977, Jazzercise's Missett was stuck in the
same spot countless entrepreneurs wind up in: By doing it all
herself, she was doing herself in. In her case, the physical toll
was obvious. She was teaching 25 fitness classes each week (and
driving 1,000 miles a week to their various locations), and, as she
says, "My body was wasting away from working out that
much."

Resolving not to carry the whole load herself, Missett shifted
her focus to training fellow dancers to teach Jazzercise classes,
effectively launching the franchise program that now numbers nearly
5,000 units.

Although your business may not be sucking the life out of you
physically, if you continue to be a control freak as your business
grows, you'll probably lose the mental sharpness and energy
needed to keep your company successful. If your business is
growing, don't be a martyr: Delegate.

6. Know What You Do

Burgerville USA's decline stemmed in large part from trying
to run along behind McDonald's and the other big chains and do
what they did on a smaller scale. Some aggressive soul-searching at
the headquarters in Vancouver, Washington, made Mears realize that
the company "couldn't compete directly with those kinds of
players and last much longer," he says.

The changes pointed the company forward by looking backward at
the things that made the family's first restaurant a local
landmark. Dick Barnett, a Beaverton, Oregon, management consultant
and author of Reignite Your Business! (Confident
Leader Press), worked with Holland Inc. on hatching a strategy to
reverse its slump. "What they've done is look at why their
doors are open," he says. "Do they want to make a lot of
money? Cook a lot of burgers? Sell health food? Or do they really
enjoy making food that people like to eat?"

7. Admit That You Don't Know Everything

Your business was founded on a good idea. Don't let the
flood of other good ideas that rushed in afterward drown your
efforts.

Missett ruefully recalls the period in the mid-1980s when the
fitness industry had gone volcanic and a group of consultants urged
her to fan out her company's program. Don't just have
franchisees with small Jazzercise operations in strip malls, the
consultants said; build your own health clubs, and fill them with
Jazzercise and other classes, such as children's
gymnastics.

"Well, I only have a degree in theater, not an MBA,"
Missett says, "so I went along with it." After just one
fitness club had been built, she realized she should have stuck to
her original concept. "Our strength was the dance program, not
all these other things that were popping up, so we stopped doing
all those other things."

Similarly, at one point, Gardenburger's Wenner realized his
product's energy was spread too thin. In the late 1980s, he
brought cheese, milk and chicken substitutes under the Gardenburger
umbrella. Then, when sales fell short of his expectations, he had a
revelation: "If we didn't focus on the familiar round
shape of a Gardenburger, this fabulous product of ours was going to
get lost in the hustle." So he got rid of everything but the
burger line in the early 1990s.

8. Make It Work

In 1993, Burgerville USA was developing a location that Mears
says "looked like it would have been wonderful for us."
The trouble was, he had resolved at the start of that fiscal year
not to open restaurants that wouldn't pull in at least $1
million a year, and the analysis suggested this site would pull in
about $900,000. That's not bad, and not far off the mark,
"But I had taken a stand and said we just couldn't live
that way," he says. "So we added breakfast items and
espresso, tweaked the look of the restaurant, and we [generated]
twice the volume we'd anticipated-$1.8 million the first
year."

The lesson that emerged from that experience, he says, was if
you know what you want, don't back off.

9. Play the Margins

It's common practice to check in periodically with major
clients and verify that your firm is still on their minds, treating
them right and deserving of their business. But Giglierano says an
entrepreneur who wants to see sales rise will resolve to do the
same with smaller and even marginal customers.

"Some of these small customers have probably remained small
because you aren't calling on them enough," says
Giglierano. They want to be treated like important clients, not
like also-rans. "If they saw somebody from your company more
often, they would have increased their orders."

These small customers may be on the verge of major growth and
could take you up with them. But how will you know that if you only
pay attention to the heavy-hitters?

10. Relive Your Failures

The beginning of the year offers a clean slate, a chance to put
problems behind you and move forward. Samaha suggests a wiser way
of looking at things might be to put any failings of the past year
in the middle of the table and let everybody take a long, painful
look at them.

"I'm not talking about a day of finger-pointing and
cutting off heads," Samaha says. "I'm talking about
doing a post-mortem in a learning environment, where mistakes are
valuable learning tools, just as successes are."

11. Pay the People Who Carry the Load

Mears says the smartest part of his company's attempt to
reinvent itself and curb its losses was eliminating a level of
bureaucracy: district managers. "We want each restaurant
manager to be the general manager of their restaurant and the most
important person in the company," he says. Toward that end,
the company established a lucrative performance-based bonus program
for the managers of its 37 restaurants.

The transition from being closely supervised to having a lot of
leeway has been tough for some of the managers, but Mears says
within a few years, he expects to see it pay off in the form of
higher-performing restaurants throughout the chain. "If this
transformation we're putting ourselves through is going to
work, the restaurant managers are the ones who are going to make it
happen," he says, "and they'll get part of the
[monetary] results."

12. Start a New Company Every Year

Barnett and his partner, Bill Kutz, dismantle their Beaverton,
Oregon, management consulting company, Barnett & Kutz Inc.,
every December and start fresh in January. They don't draw up
new articles of incorporation or go through other formalities
wastefully, but they act as if the company has shut down and
they're starting from scratch. "We question everything,
down to whether we still want to be partners," Barnett
says.

Their aim is to underscore the idea that change can happen and
that nothing about a company is set in stone. "The real
outcome is that you find you've been dragging along baggage you
really don't need," Barnett says. "So you just set
that stuff aside and move on."

Three years ago, the pair set their sights on the speaking
circuit, believing their future lay in Barnett making the rounds of
association meetings and other speaking engagements, spreading the
word about their style of corporate management. By mid-1998, both
partners realized the speeches weren't getting them where they
wanted to be. So their resolution for 1999 is to find a new way to
disseminate their ideas.

"We don't want to stick to something just because
neither of us is willing to stop doing it," Barnett says.
"We'll never get off the plateau and start climbing again
that way."

13. Go Back to School

Continuing education, innovation training and other
self-improvement programs are good not only for employees, but also
for the boss, says Richard Tyler, a Houston management consultant
and author of Smart Business Strategies (Power
Publishing).

Continuing your education keeps you stimulated and gives you
vital business information, Tyler says, but he sees it as an
unacknowledged management skill as well. "When your employees
start to think they know more than you do about your business, the
first thing they lose is respect for you, and the second thing they
lose is productivity," he says.

14. Pick One Long Shot and Ride It Home

Although Wenner's Gardenburger company has grown
explosively, it's still tiny in the eyes of the corporate
world. That's why Jay Leno, Tom Brokaw, The New York
Times and others made hay with the fact that Gardenburger was
one of the advertisers on the final episode of
"Seinfeld." The spot cost about $1.6 million, but Wenner
confidently estimates the payoff was worth more than $2 million in
publicity. Says Wenner, "When our marketing vice president
[got the idea], everybody wondered, 'What if we spend all that
money and it doesn't work?' But I'm an entrepreneur,
and to be an entrepreneur, you have to dream big."

15. Ask Your Employees What Your New Year's Resolutions
Should Be

It's a more active form of the open-door policy that many
employees assume is just a policy, not a real opportunity for them
to open up to you. Samaha advises entrepreneurs to ask each of
their employees to submit one idea they have for improving any part
of the operation, no matter how small.

"The employees see up close where things are bumpy and
where they're smooth," she says. "If they're
given permission, and even an invitation, to come forward with
their opinions, they can point out all kinds of opportunities that
you might miss on your own."

Why not make it a New Year's tradition? At the holiday party
or on the last workday of the year, make a big production out of
getting each person to say what they'd do if they had the power
to change one thing about your company. And then publicly resolve
to follow through on five of the best ideas. As everyone who's
ever tried to lose weight in January knows, there's no better
incentive to following through on a resolution than making the vow
public.

Next Step

When making your New Year's resolutions, don't forget
about the Y2K bug--and don't think it won't affect you. How
do you keep it from wreaking havoc on your business? Check out next
month's Entrepreneur, where we'll tell you all you
need to know to zap that bug.